I think I'm going to coin a new acronym: YAWBE. Pronounced "yaw-bee" it stands for "Yet Another Weekend Blog Entry." Seems to fit. Since it sort of forms a word, it can safely be called an acronym. Otherwise it's an initialism. I learn something new every day.
 
Go ahead and notch another action-packed and fun -filled weekend on the books. Why does it seem they seem to come and go ever faster as the years pass? Reminds me of a particular kind of doughnut. A "Sucks, don't it?" kind of doughnut. There is a theory out there about time moving faster as one gets older; I'll do some research on it and get back to y'all when I recall what I've read and/or find out more.

As for this weekend, it was great! It started on Friday, when I was just about to walk out the door for a casual run. A friend called and asked if I would be willing to lead a visitor on a trail run in the area. Nothing too difficult, about 7 miles or so. I agreed, though the mileage was higher than I really wanted to do, since I was planning a 13 on Saturday morning.

We met at the Carson Station Best Western, and I lead the way up Lower and Upper EZ trails on C-Hill. Theresa was having some difficulty given the elevation (she's from much lower - <1000') and a recent cold, so we cut over on the Flag Trail, down the Goat Trail and headed back. I was fine with the 5.5!

Saturday morning was a posted run on ccrunners. 9 miles at 8:30 in Ash Canyon, and a pre-loading 4 on the V&T Lasso at 7:45 for any who were willing. Well, none were. I did the lasso solo (always nice) but the wind was biting and the temps on the chilly side: around 45. I got back to the start and waited to see who would appear for the 9 miler. Again, none. 

Sad really. Invite a crowd and get nobody to show. Perhaps I should have showered between the Friday run and the Saturday one? At any rate, I decided I didn't want to play in the cold wind, so I bagged the 9 myself and went home to get ready for my son's 13th birthday party. The party was originally slated to be at a local water park, but given the chilly conditions, we moved it to an indoor trampoline park. Wow, did they have a grand time!

After the party, a few of the new teens came back to the house and had a sleepover. I'm glad I don't have to do much about those anymore; pretty much clean up the kitchen after late night snacking is all.

Sunday was a run and run and work-a-run day. I first ran to Hobart Reservoir from Lakeview. Tough climb up. According to RunningAhead, it was a 5000' elev gain and loss in the 11 miles. Yikes! But the view was spectabulous:

I spent a few minutes in the sun stretching, snapped the above photo, and headed back down the hill. I had a busy slate still ahead. After getting home, it was a couple of chores around the house and then off and gone to the Melanie Pfieffer Melanoma 5K. I had volunteered to do the timing for the event. I got there early to scope/run the course. It was an easy out and back, with only one street-crossing hazard. Get a couple of people at that point for safety and all would be good. 

I had my camera in my pocket, but never got around to snapping any photos. Bummer. Maybe somebody who was there will read this and send me some. Far fetched, I know, because it implies people read this. :-)

Only about half the participants had pre-registered before the cutoff, so I was a busy boy, tap-tap-tapping data into the timing app on my iPhone (PocketTimer Pro). I had barely gotten them in (OK, I actually hadn't gotten them all), when the starting horn sounded. I added a few after the start (Nice feature, by the way.) and was prepped for the finishers.

If you're interested here are the results. I didn't hang around for the free buffett afterward at El Charro, though it looked amazing. The room was crowded, and there was nowhere to sit by the time I got the results organized. I don't do crowds well anyway, so I let the organizers know the results had been both sent to them and posted, and bugged out to a great roast beast dinner at home. 

After totally oinking down dinner, it was crash-and-burn time. What a great weekend!

When I run, I usually tote along my Garmin Forerunner 405CX in order to keep track of the miles trod, and to capture the information into courses and routes for others to (potentially) follow if it turns out to be a good one. Since not everyone uses Garmin products and may not want to use the Garmin website's courses feature, I also convert the GPS data to Google Earth and post all the information into a .kmz file (scroll to the download link) for viewing in Google Earth on a local pc.

The data is the same: XML data containing latitude and longitude and that's about it. When it gets to either the Garmin website and/or Google Earth, that data is interpreted over maps to give the user a visual look of the data rather than lat/long coordinates, and gives distance, and elevation profile. This is where it gets all divergent.

I did a run last Friday that I converted to a course. The base run data as uploaded is shown below (Sorry, you don't get to see my imminent heart attack displayed in the heart rate info, nor the "trudge factor" in the timing chart.):

When I elected to save the run as a course, the data changed! Instead of being over 7 miles, the course data was 6.95, though the elevation data remained the same with a gain of 1066 feet. However, I do like that the elevation profile no longer starts at sea level, making the 1000+ elevation gain almost look like it hurt as much as it did.

In addition to saving the run as a course, I used the Garmin function to export the data to a Google Earth file. This conversion results in yet another divergent data set. In this case, the run distance shows as 7.05 miles, which isn't too terribly off (only 1 %) from the base run data, but a big delta shows up in the elevation gain: 1458 feet. Wow. That's a 37% difference! I must admit I much prefer the look of a Google Earth elevation profile over either Garmin:

Just looking at the elevation profiles, I get the feeling that Garmin is smoothing the data that erases the small changes in elevation despite using Google as the mapping base. However, over the course of a longer run, the tiny smoothing changes the overall run a lot. Those three and five foot elevation changes on the trail add up. Tell me. Toward the end of a run, any little hill up -- only to go back down -- gets a sound round of cursing from me.